Breaking: Airplane Mystery Solved!

You read it here first, folks. The airplane puzzle has been solved. No, not the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, or the “zombie plane,” as CNN has speculatively dubbed it. Not even the timeless stumper as to whether Joey has ever seen a grown man naked. I’m talking about a mysterious small aircraft that has been incessantly circling a neighborhood in Sacramento for the past few weeks. News 10, Sacramento’s ABC affiliate, has the scoop. Through some intrepid sleuthing, a college student–who chose, perhaps wisely, to remain anonymous–found out that the planes use the FBI’s callsign, “Jenna.”

The idea of a lonely Cessna pilot keeping tabs on someone seems very cloak-and-dagger, but the romance ends when you consider that if the whole neighborhood has been complaining about it for weeks, the subject of the surveillance has probably made the Feds by now. At least those concerned with the surveillance state can rest assured that the FBI isn’t using drones yet. Makes me wonder if anyone at the FBI has seen “Casino.” Or “Goodfellas.” Or, really, any Scorsese film other than “Age of Innocence,” which I assume he made for everyone’s wives.

The “Jenna” callsign reminds me of an even cooler aviation mystery: the “Janet” flights. “Janet” is the callsign for the privately owned jetliners contracted to shuttle employees to Area 51. The truth is out there.

For those readers who both appreciated my reference to “Airplane!” and share my love for cinema of dubious quality, I urge you to check out the 1957 stinker “Zero Hour!” if you haven’t already. The producers of “Airplane!” found it so funny, that they based their script off of it. YouTube user StevePiers put together this brilliant mashup of the two movies to show just how uncannily similar they are. If you don’t have time to watch the whole movie, you can watch the YouTube mashup instead, but where’s the fun in that?